Why Litigation Support? The Sky is the Limit

Two such seers in the area of litigation support are Walter Bithell, of Holland & Hart in Boise, Idaho, and Sam Guiberson, of Guiberson Law Offices in Houston. Both are litigators with the experience and insight to shed light on what, for many, is murky territory indeed.

"If you look at it as just a system for filing documents, it's really a waste," Bithell says. "But that's the way a lot of lawyers use it. Instead, it should be used as a way of getting a handle on lots of documents so that we can think our way through them. It allows a lawyer to pick up on fact patterns, and that's really what litigation is all about."

Guiberson adds that the marketplace has tended to create unrealistic expectations about computers. "It's far too simplistic for lawyers who have not done this work to think that all they need to do to catch up with the trend is to go out and buy something off the shelf," he says. "The truth is that there is no shelf upon which the really decisive skills can be found. Those skills are more organizational and process-oriented, and they aren't for sale out there. It's learned through experience."

When practitioners realize that litigation support is simply an adjunct to their thinking process, albeit a very powerful one. Bithell and Guiberson agree, the sky is the limit.

"Once you input the information into your system, you can just sit there and generate all sorts of interesting areas to explore," Bithell says.

"You can say, for example, I wonder what was going on here in June. I wonder who wrote the first letter that prompted party number one to respond this way. I wonder when the first time this subject comes up in any of the documentation. I wonder if it was ever discussed at a board meeting ... and so on. It's a great way to highlight factual patterns that could be crucial in your case."

Guiberson uses a visual metaphor to describe what litigation support technology can do: "As we move along the paper trail, what we have studied becomes more remote and what we have looked at most recently becomes more present in our minds, even though that may not be representative of the merits of the particular case.

"But what computers do is put you in the center of a paper sphere where every document and every piece of data is equally accessible to your intellectual process. That way, you're no longer victimized by your immediate recollection. You can postulate or consider relationships that are far broader than those based on what you read yesterday or what you forgot last month. This brings about a big change in the way you approach evidence and investigate facts."

Bithell and Guiberson agree that it also tends to change the competitive rules of law practice itself. "Litigation support is a great equalizer," Bithell says. "It opens up a whole series of options to small and medium size firms that they didn't have before." According to Guiberson, the changes wrought by this technology are nothing short of revolutionary.

"The necessity of building large organizations to supply expertise and analysis for large lawsuits may be a thing of the past," he says. "Now the kind of organization that is capable of taking on major litigation is much, much smaller, albeit better trained, than it had to be before."